Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
Review

Mission to Mao

By Roderick MacFarquhar
Nixon and Mao: The Week that Changed the World
by Margaret MacMillan

Random House, 404 pp., $27.95

"This was the week that changed the world" was Richard Nixon's summing up at the end of his trip to China in February 1972.[1] The hyperbole was justified, for this visit to China by an American president was a turning point in the cold war. Hitherto, the Soviet Union and China had been antagonists of the US. Thereafter, both Beijing and Moscow found it in their interest to come to agreements with Washington. For the Chinese it meant coming in from the cold. After the announcement of the visit in July 1971, the US effort to keep China out of the UN lost credibility: the People's Republic of China replaced the Republic of China (Taiwan) in the Security Council that October; the US was unable even to keep Taiwan in the General Assembly. Member states that had loyally voted with the US began transferring diplomatic recognition from the Nationalist government in Taiwan to the Communist regime in Beijing.

Margaret MacMillan, a provost and a professor of history at the University of Toronto and warden-elect of St. Antony's College, Oxford, has taken this dramatic episode as the subject of her third book. Professor MacMillan started her intellectual career, impelled by family connections, with a thesis on the British in India between 1880 and 1920, a product of which was the empathetic account of Women of the Raj (1988). Perhaps a familial imperative was again involved with her multiple-prize-winning second book, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2003), for David Lloyd-George, the British prime minister at the Versailles peace talks that ended World War I, was her great-grandfather. More importantly, she had discovered a niche which her superb narrative gifts enabled her to exploit: take an important but short, discrete historical episode and use archives and the best secondary sources to turn it into a popular history for a new generation of intelligent general readers.

This is what she endeavors to do again with Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World. It is a harder task than Paris 1919; relatively few readers outside the ranks of twentieth-century historians know what happened at Versailles, except perhaps that it fueled German indignation and gave Hitler his cause. In the case of Nixon and Mao, anyone over the age of fifty probably has some memory of the visit; and since then readers of book reviews in these pages and elsewhere will have been made aware of commentary on the visit and the diplomacy leading up to it. Moreover, many of the Americans who took part in the meetings and their planning are still alive and will doubtless scan her pages to see if she has been fair to them. It's a familiar tale, but MacMillan's strength is that she is a great storyteller, and in Nixon and Mao she pulls together the contemporary data and memoirs along with subsequent revelations and commentary.

1.

Nixon's motives for the trip are well known, elaborated in his memoirs and those of Henry Kissinger, then his national security adviser. As early as his article in Foreign Affairs in October 1967, Nixon had written about his long-term goal of "pulling China back into the world community—but as a great and progressing nation, not as the epicenter of world revolution."[2] But more concretely, in the short term he hoped to persuade the Chinese to influence the North Vietnamese to agree to an honorable peace that would allow the US to withdraw from Vietnam. He had failed to get Soviet help in resolving the Vietnam War; the Chinese were the alternative. He also hoped a meeting in China would put pressure on Moscow to agree to a major arms limitation agreement. To accomplish this, Nixon, the ultra cold warrior and rabid anti-Communist, was prepared to go to Beijing. As many have pointed out, it was precisely these right-wing credentials that meant that Nixon, and only Nixon, could go to China.

Kissinger was initially skeptical. When Nixon told him in the first weeks of his presidency in early 1969 that he wanted to open up relations with China, Kissinger told his aide General Alexander Haig: "Our leader has taken leave of reality. He has just ordered me to make this flight of fantasy come true." In the summer of 1969, Nixon's chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, told Kissinger that Nixon intended to visit China before the end of his presidency. Kissinger's smiling reply, according to Haldeman, was: "Fat chance." But once Kissinger was convinced of Nixon's seriousness and determination—by the end of 1969, according to MacMillan—he threw himself into the project, to the extent that in his memoirs he attempted to claim that it was a joint initiative, or, as he put it once: "I opened up China with five people."

Nixon rightly asserted his primacy in the endeavor. He told a journalist during the presidential campaign: "You need a President for foreign policy; no Secretary of State is really important; the President makes foreign policy." MacMillan's title is an implicit endorsement of Nixon's primacy. But as Robert Dallek has written:

Nixon's preoccupation with winning exclusive credit for the China initiative angered Kissinger.... He was as determined as the president to milk the opening to China for as much personal credit as possible.[3]

Coincidentally, Mao appears to have resented the international publicity that Premier Zhou Enlai got for his role in the opening to America. In mid-November 1973, despite having just granted Kissinger a cordial three-hour audience on his first visit to Beijing as secretary of state (his previous visits in 1971, 1972, and February 1973 were as national security adviser), the Chairman ordered the Politburo to attack Zhou for "rightist capitulationism" and "selling out the country" in his dealings with the United States. From November 25 to December 5, 1973, Zhou came under heavy criticism. Seizing the chance to get rid of somebody whom she saw as a barrier to her own power, Mao's wife Jiang Qing accused the premier of trying to supplant the Chairman. Even the recently rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping, who would later preside over the expansion of Sino-American ties, had to join the witch-hunt against Zhou.[4] But Mao was only reminding Zhou of who was boss. He needed Zhou, and after he had made an abject self-criticism, the premier survived.

Nixon treated Kissinger better, though they never became friends and, as MacMillan puts it, "rarely socialized with each other." Among intimates, Kissinger was heard to refer to the President as "the madman" or "our drunken friend." Years later, Nixon said: "I will be fair to Henry, even if he isn't always to me." But basically both men realized, as did Mao and Zhou seven thousand miles away, that they needed the other for the China initiative. Nixon did not trust the State Department: too bureaucratic and leak-prone. Kissinger wanted to deny Secretary of State William Rogers credit for managing the opening. According to Lawrence Eagleburger, then a Kissinger aide (later briefly secretary of state at the end of the presidency of George H.W. Bush), Nixon and Kissinger developed a "conspiratorial approach to foreign policy management."

MacMillan uses her secondary sources to illustrate the rivalry between Nixon and Kissinger, and at appropriate places in the narrative she gives the relevant biographic details for them and for Mao and Zhou. But she herself rarely passes judgment on the four principal actors in this drama. She mainly leaves that to others.[5] The meeting in China is the thing she is interested in, and the way in which the four men each contributed to its remarkable success.

2.

MacMillan tells the familiar story in an unusual way. The first half of the book is concerned mainly with Nixon's first day in Beijing, February 21, 1972, when the highpoint was his first meeting with Mao. The personalities of the four principals are dissected early on, along with a discussion of the Sino-Soviet dispute. The second half of the book begins with an account of how Nixon and Kissinger arranged the opening to Beijing, and then covers the rest of the actual visit. First, there were the devious attempts to send messages to Beijing without the State Department being aware of what exactly was afoot, using high-level Romanian and then Pakistani channels to signal their desire for talks. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were less scrupulous than their diplomatic colleagues. They planted a navy man as a clerk at the National Security Council; he made copies of all documents that crossed his desk and passed them to Admiral Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. On one occasion, this enterprising sailor got into Kissinger's room, rifled through his suitcase and briefcases, and purloined his secret memo to Nixon about his talks with Zhou.[6] Nevertheless, when we consider both the eagerness of Nixon and Kissinger to meet the Chinese leaders and the various channels they used to communicate with them, it is amazing that the project remained so secret.

In mid-April 1971, the US ping-pong team playing in the world championships in Tokyo was invited to Beijing on the personal orders of Mao. Two weeks after this breakthrough on the people-to-people front, on April 27, came the message from Beijing which Nixon and Kissinger had been impatiently awaiting, expressing the Chinese government's willingness "to receive publicly in Peking a special envoy of the President of the US (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the US Sec[retar]y of State or even the President of the US himself for a direct meeting and discussions."[7] MacMillan recounts the discussions between the President and Kissinger about who should be the emissary. In their respective memoirs, both Nixon and Kissinger suggest it was a friendly discussion of all the options. But MacMillan is probably right in implying that Kissinger was on tenterhooks, wanting to go, and that Nixon, already resentful of the publicity that his national security adviser was getting, was casting about for someone else to send; in the end he conceded that Kissinger was the logical choice.[8]

Then in July 1971, Kissinger's secret visit to Beijing was again a masterpiece of undercover work. On an Asian trip, Kissinger faked illness in Pakistan and was hurried away ostensibly for rest and recovery while his official plane sat on the runway; in fact he was flown on a civilian aircraft to Beijing accompanied by three aides, four senior Chinese officials, and two US Secret Service men. The latter became thoroughly alarmed at the abandonment of "Standard Operating Procedure" when they learned that they would be flying in a foreign—Pakistani—plane with Communist China as its destination.[9] Arriving in the Chinese capital, the Kissinger team was escorted to the Diao Yu Tai complex of VIP guest bungalows, there to wait a few hours for Zhou Enlai.[10]

Zhou's and Kissinger's job was to prepare the way for a Nixon visit, exchanging views on all the potential issues that could break a deal. They then had to agree on the text of the announcement of Kissinger's visit and Nixon's forthcoming one. According to Kissinger, he rejected the first Chinese draft, which would have depicted the Americans as supplicants, but a more neutral version emerged after the Chinese had consulted with Mao. Kissinger hurried back to the US to brief Nixon in the Western White House, and on July 15, the President made his historic television announcement that he would "undertake what I deeply hope will become a journey for peace, peace not just for our generation but for future generations on this earth we share together." To celebrate, Nixon gave his staff a rare treat, dinner at a leading Los Angeles restaurant, at which the President ordered a $600 bottle of wine.[11]

The announcement was widely approved both in the US and abroad. The Senate Democratic leader, Mike Mansfield, said: "I am astounded, delighted and happy." Businessmen began to think about the boundless Chinese market, though it would not really begin to open up until the 1980s after Mao and Zhou had died and Deng had launched the reform era. The conservatives who grumbled at a sellout to communism were relatively isolated. Anger abroad was felt by close allies—especially Japan and Britain—who were deeply offended by being kept in the dark. Prime Minister Edward Heath was reportedly incandescent because Nixon's initiative undermined the British position in its negotiations to normalize relations with the People's Republic. The Nationalist Chinese government in Taiwan was even angrier and certainly worried. The Soviet leadership was "in a state of confusion, if not shock."

In his memoirs, Kissinger criticizes China experts who failed to see that "the Chinese might have an incentive to move toward us without American concessions because of their need for an American counterweight to the Soviet Union."[12] The implication is that Kissinger correctly assessed the strength of the US bargaining position well before the Beijing visit. If this were so, it is difficult to understand why Kissinger, early on in his first meeting with Zhou Enlai on July 9, 1971, offered dramatic concessions on Taiwan, contradicting US policy that the issue was "unresolved":

As for the political future of Taiwan, we are not advocating a "two Chinas" solution or a "one China, one Taiwan" solution. As a student of history, one's prediction would have to be that the political evolution is likely to be in the direction which Prime Minister Chou En-lai indicated to me [i.e., that Taiwan "must be restored to the motherland"].[13]

Kissinger emphasized that in word and deed the Nixon administration would treat the Chinese regime in a very special manner which few even of its allies could expect. He reported Nixon's very strong commitment:

Let me say now that we will never collude with other countries against the People's Republic of China, either with our allies or with some of our opponents...the US will not take any major steps affecting your interests without discussing them with you and taking your views into account.[14]

The China initiative greatly affected the interests of US allies Japan and Taiwan, but no discussions about it had been held with them. Nixon and Kissinger were prepared to bend over backward to play the China card against North Vietnam and the Soviet Union.

It is not clear, however, why they would be so immediately forthcoming if they were aware at the time that Mao Zedong was equally if not more desirous of an opening to the US. The consequence was that the relationship was established on the basis of the US being the supplicant. In the thirty-five years since the Nixon opening, it has recently been argued, American presidents of both parties have displayed an overriding tendency to avoid antagonizing the Chinese leadership.[15]

3.

To understand the weakness of the Chinese position as Nixon began trying to engage China in 1969, one must consider the problems Mao and his colleagues faced vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. For over ten years, Moscow and Beijing had been in contention over Communist bloc policy toward the West, with the Chinese accusing the Soviets of selling out. In 1963, the Chinese took the dispute public after the Soviets signed a partial test-ban treaty with the United States and Great Britain in a transparent but unsuccessful attempt to freeze China out of the nuclear club. All through the 1960s there were minor clashes along the Sino-Soviet frontier. The Chinese were particularly alarmed by Russia's announcement in 1968 of the Brezhnev doctrine. Issued as a justification for the Soviet overthrow of the "liberal" Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia that summer, it claimed Moscow's right to intervene in any country where the government was deserting the Communist path. The Chinese had no brief for the Prague Spring, but they felt the need to demonstrate that China could not be subsumed under the Brezhnev doctrine.

In March 1969, with the permission of the central authorities, the Shenyang Military Region activated a year-old plan to retaliate against Soviet incursions along the border.[16] The battlefield was to be Zhenbao (Damansky) Island in the UssuriRiver where there had been incidents on December 28, 1968, and January 23, 1969. The Chinese had given special training to about one thousand men drawn from three armies stationed in the region. On March 2, 1969, this force ambushed and, according to the official Chinese account, "totally annihilated" a contingent of sixty-one Soviet soldiers. According to a secret Soviet account,

During the provocation, the Chinese military committed incredibly brutal and cruel acts against the wounded Soviet border guards ...the wounded were shot by the Chinese from close range [and/or] stabbed with bayonets and knives. The faces of some of the casualties were distorted beyond recognition; others had their uniforms and boots taken off by the Chinese.